Friday, April 23, 2010

Why I will stop doing FF... for a while

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBase

As everybody who has been using Twitter for a while, Friday is the day when people does #Followfriday or #FF, a practice where you recommend people you consider valuable to other people who follows you.

This is done so you can meet different people, with similar ideas, or maybe with different ideas, but with that make your timeline interesting and makes you see a new perspective.

At the beginning, doing #Followfriday seemed like a great idea, but now, that I follow 3291 people and 3607 more follows me, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to do justice to everyone.

First of all, I follow people that have made laugh, think, see new ideas, learn new stuff, open my mind to things that I would have never seen that way if they didn't make me open my mind. In that sense, I think eveyone can be recommended.

Now, recommending them it's difficult because you have to put in a brief sentence why you think they are worth following. How do you do that with 3200 persons?

As I said before, it wouldn't be fair. If I make a list (like " #FF @person1 @person2 @person3" ) I'm not providing a good reason for those who follow me to follow the people I'm recommending. And even when I do it like that, it takes a long time. If I did #FF giving a reason for every person I follow or follows me, I would finish next Friday!

Then, maybe the description I'm using to recommend this person is the best, but maybe they don't think the same (I have the suspicion that once I made someone feel uncomfortable when I did this inadvertently).

Also, people that makes conversation, that answer my tweets, have certain advantage, because I can easily find an accurate reason for doing #FF, but as I said before, this doesn't mean that people I don't talk frecuently aren't worth recommending.

Besides, I think so many tweets with #FF in them are considered spam for those that doesn't follow this practice.

And last, but not least, time is a great factor. When you're working 8 hours, commuting 4 more, and without an smartphone to open Twitter, it's really difficult to do a #FF.

So, I'm looking for a new way to do #FF (today I'll do it in a post, later, outside Twitter) and I'll stop recommending as I did before. I'll thank your FF if you want to do it, if you don't want to because I'm not doing anymore on Twitter, I'll understand.

My goal is to make this a little more inclusive, recommending different people every time (or at least I'll try to do this) and maybe for a reason they want me to recommend them. Besides, if you know any tool, site or new idea to do Followfriday, I'll thank you if you can tell me about it.

P. D. I wrote this very fast, if you find any mistake in content or in my spelling or grammar, feel free to tell me.

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2 comments:

J said...

your problem might be the amount of people you follow... :|

Karina Velazquez said...

It's a lot of people, yes, but I rather to follow this people and knowing that I'm able to learn new things just by reading my timeline than follow just a few and lost all that.

Thanks for the comment.